spinny boiii @ RCL National Championship 2025 (Event Recap)
May 10, 2025
Robot Combat League (RCL) Nationals 2025 was held at the Discovery Cube in Santa Ana, California, on May 3rd-4th. This annual event is the culmination of each RCL season, and only the top-ranked robots on RobotCombatEvents were invited for each weight class. This was my first year attending, and I brought my 3lb bot “spinny boiii” and my 12lb bot “Creature.”
The competition took place across 2 days, and matches felt fast-paced. It was my first time running multiple robots at an event, and I found myself bouncing back and forth between their pit tables. I am exceedingly grateful for my two teammates, Benji (spinny boiii) and Caleb (Creature), for keeping me grounded and sane throughout the event, and putting in a majority of the repair work on both robots while I focused more on strategy and driving.
Fight Recaps
The rest of this post will focus on spinny boiii’s fights. Creature’s event recap is covered in a separate post, which you can read here.
Fight 1: Polytron
Our first fight of the event was against Polytron. This 4-wheel-drive beater bar robot is almost entirely 3D printed, and uses a laser-cut steel weapon with a TPU hub and the massive Cherry Bomb motor from Just ‘Cuz Robotics, resulting in a fairly unique hub motor beater bar setup.
When we did the final assembly of spinny boiii the night before the event, we had some concerns about the weight of the robot. To be absolutely sure we were under the limit, we removed a TPU spacer that sits between the weapon bearings, thinking that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. When we weighed in at the event, we were far enough below the limit to add that spacer back, but we didn’t have time to do so before this fight. Unfortunately, that spacer had been putting in a lot more work than we realized.
Without this small component, the weapon bearings had nothing keeping them from popping out of their less-than-perfect press-fits in the beater bar. There shouldn’t be any obvious loads that push on the bearings axially, but shock loading causes things to loosen up in all sorts of strange ways. After a few weapon-on-weapon hits, one of the bearings popped out, and our weapon stopped spinning. There wasn’t much we could do after that, and we lost the fight by a judge’s decision. We replaced the spacer after the fight. This was the first and last time we had any weapon issues with this robot. Unfortunately, some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
Unfortunately, our beater bar also cracked after this fight, forcing us to replace it. The one we had been using was relatively old at this point, and had taken a lot of damage from previous tournaments.
Fight 2: Hookfang
Hookfang is an SSP Kit lifter robot with a few customizations. Although they were able to get under us a few times, they never fully pinned or controlled us, and we were able to get several solid hits that eventually tore off their front forks. The SSP kit is quite durable and lasted the full 3 minutes, but we won the fight by a unanimous judges’ decision.
Fight 3: horridus
This fight was the most one-sided of the event. We consistently won face-to-face engagements, and hardly left Horridus any time to breath between hits. This fight ended in a knockout after 45 seconds when horridus got stuck upside down. I’m super proud of spinny boiii’s speed and aggression in this fight. It might be the cleanest one we’ve had so far.
Fight 4: Twisted Sister
The next match was much more back-and-forth. Twisted Sister is a nasty horizontal spinner with a short, sharp, gear-driven blade and heavy armor. In general, horizontals are hard for spinny boiii becasue they tend to do a lot of damage to the front TPU nubbins that serve as our front ground contacts. We popped them up in the air several times, but sure enough, they tore up much of the face of our bot. Eventually, we managed to break off the gear driving their blade, rendering their weapon useless. Shortly after, we landed a hit that tossed them on top of that gear, high-centering them. This resulted in a hard-fought knockout victory.
Fight 5: Misdirected Aggression
This turned out to be perhaps the scariest fight of the event for spinny boiii. Misdirected Aggression is another horizontal spinner, with a massive key blade and a weapon system that does not quit. Before the event, I saw the driver repeatedly ramming this robot’s active weapon into the arena walls at full tilt, testing the durability of the weapon and looking for weaknesses. Early in the fight, our front ears got torn up significantly. Our weapon started hitting the ground, and we were forced to flip the robot upside down and reverse the weapon direction to keep fighting. We miraculously managed to make our opponent “do the thing”, propping them up on the wall, which resulted in a knockout victory. The driver was asking us to free them and keep the fight going, which we would normally do, but after taking so much damage and making it this deep in the tournament, we were more than happy to scrape by with the win.
Fight 6: Z3phyr
This fight was one of the quarterfinal matches. It started strong for spinny boiii, with a barrage of winning face-to-face engagements that had Z3phyr reeling. Unfortunately, right after one of these winning hits, they spun rapidly in the air, and as we accidentally drove under them, their large, thin weapon sliced one of our wheels. The hit actually embedded the wheel’s rubber into the nearby wheelguard, causing the wheel to completetly jam. After this, we did our best to stay pointed toward our opponent and keep fighting, but eventually, they got around to our backside and delivered a fatal blow, resulting in a knockout that ended our tournament run.
This strike actually cleaved through our power switch, causing the robot to simply turn off. It was the largest gash spinny boiii had ever taken, and is pictued below. (Pardon the goofy sticker lol). Additionally, our beater bar ended up cracking after a weapon-on-weapon hit. This has proven to be an issue against thin vertical spinners because the pressure of their hits is concentrated on a small area. I made 4 beater bars initially, and after an all-in record of 18-4 with this robot, they’ve all broken. A good run, but I think we can improve. I don’t have access to a CNC machine to make them myself anymore, and outsourcing them would be prohibitively expensive at that failure rate. We’ll likely re-think our weapon desing in the future.
Bonus: Beetleweight Rumble
After getting knocked out of the tournament, we decided to participate in the beetleweight rumble, where a large selection of robots duke it out in a free-for-all and try to be the last one standing. This was a lot of fun, and we performed quite well. One of our wheel guards was fairly shredded, but we sustained no serious damage, and probably dealt the most damage to other robots. The announcer semi-randomly chooses the rumble winner based on audience applause, and while we didn’t officially win, we definitely performed the best, so I’m content.
Conclusion
All in all, I’m super proud of spinny boiii’s performance at RCL Nationals 2025. We had some ups and downs, but we fought hard and made it to the quarterfinals, which is a huge accomplishment. It was easily the most challenging beetleweight bracket that I’ve competed in thus far, and I’m proud of our performance. I’m excited to take what we learned from this event and apply it to our future builds and competitions.
